My lack of updates, especially those of an illustration and artwork nature, is down to two people: Cennydd Bowles and James Box. They've just written a book entitled Undercover User Experience that's about to be published by Peachpit and they asked me to do the chapter illustrations.
This is the first "set" of illustrations I've been commissioned to do from scratch and it was a fairly sizeable job made much easier by clear instruction and good ideas from the authors who were a lot of fun to work with. The book sets out to be deliberately free of jargon and offer new angles to approach things from and Cennydd and James felt a slightly abstract and funny set of illustrations would best serve their intentions and steer the final results away from cliches like light bulbs above people's heads.
We ran through several loose ideas for each chapter before settling on a central character who would face different (and slightly bizarre) trials in each illustration, relating in some way to the content of the chapter in question.
Mr Joe O'Sullivan (central character) and Mr Daniel Robert Chapman ("Boss" character) kindly loaned me themselves for an afternoon and I made several hundred photographs of them in increasingly silly poses in Joe's garden to form the basis for the drawings (Sadly, I have sworn to them that I will delete the photos from my hard drive once the book goes to press).
The set of 7 illustrations are shown above, give them a click to see them larger and for more info.
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